Hanna (film)
Hanna is a 2011 action thriller film directed by Joe Wright. The film stars Saoirse Ronan as the title character, a girl raised in the wilderness of northern Finland by her father, an ex-CIA operative, who trains her as an assassin. Cate Blanchett portrays a senior CIA agent who tries to track down and eliminate the girl and her father. The soundtrack was written by The Chemical Brothers.
Hanna was released in North America in April 2011 and in Europe in May 2011. Reviewers praised the performances of Ronan and Blanchett as well as the action sequences and themes.
Plot
Hanna Heller is a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her father, Erik, in rural northern Finland. Since the age of two, Hanna has been trained by Erik, an ex-CIA operative from Germany, to be a skilled assassin. He teaches her hand-to-hand combat and drills her in target shooting. Erik knows a secret that cannot become public and Marissa Wiegler, a senior CIA officer, searches for him in order to eliminate him.Erik has trained Hanna with the intent that she will kill Marissa. One night, Hanna tells Erik that she is "ready" to face their enemies. Erik digs up a radio beacon that will alert the CIA to their presence. Although he warns Hanna that a confrontation with Marissa will be fatal for either her or Marissa, he leaves the final decision to Hanna, who activates the beacon. Erik leaves, instructing her to meet him in Berlin.
Hanna is seized by special forces and taken to an underground CIA complex where a suspicious Marissa sends a decoy to interrogate Hanna when Hanna asks for her by name. While talking to the double, Hanna starts to cry and embraces the double tightly, which makes her captors uneasy. They send guards to her cell to sedate her.
As they enter the cell, Hanna kills the double along with some of the guards and escapes, discovering that she is in Morocco. Hanna meets Sebastian and Rachel, who are on a camper-van holiday with their children, Sophie and Miles, by chance. Hanna stows away in the family's camper-van on the ferry to Spain, seeking to reach Berlin. The family is kind to her, and she and Sophie become friends: Hanna even tells Sophie about the Berlin rendezvous and they even share a kiss.
Marissa hires Isaacs, a sadistic former agent, to capture Hanna while other agents are searching for Erik. Marissa kills Hanna's maternal grandmother after failing to learn anything useful from her. Isaacs and two skinheads have discovered from the Moroccan hotelier with whom Hanna stayed about the family and trail them, cornering Hanna and the family, but she manages to escape after a vicious fight.
Marissa interrogates the family and discovers that Hanna is heading to Berlin. Meanwhile, Erik fights off an attempted assassination and tries but fails to kill Marissa. Arriving at the rendezvous, Hanna meets Knepfler, an eccentric magician and friend of Erik's, who lives in an abandoned amusement park. Before Erik arrives, Marissa and Isaacs appear. Hanna escapes, but overhears comments that suggest Erik is not her biological father.
Later, Hanna goes to her grandmother's empty apartment where she finds Erik, who admits that he is not her biological father. He once recruited pregnant women into a CIA program where their children's DNA was enhanced in order to create super-soldiers. After the project was shut down, its subjects were eliminated. Marissa and Isaacs arrive; Erik acts as a distraction to allow Hanna to escape. Erik kills Isaacs, but is shot dead by Marissa, who then goes to Knepfler's house finding Hanna, who has just discovered Knepfler, who had been tortured to death by Isaacs.
After Hanna flees, she is cornered by Marissa at an abandoned theme park. In a final confrontation, Hanna turns her back to Marissa who shoots at her; but Hanna wounds Marissa by firing an arrow at her. Pursuing a now-staggering Marissa, Hanna knocks her down a slide before killing her with two shots to the heart; a method she used while hunting deer at the film's beginning.
Cast
- Saoirse Ronan as Hanna
- Eric Bana as Erik Heller
- Vicky Krieps as Johanna Zadek
- Cate Blanchett as Marissa Wiegler
- Paros Arrowsmith as CIA Tech #1
- John Macmillan as Lewis
- Tim Beckmann as Walt
- Paul Birchard as Bob
- Christian Malcolm as Head of Ops
- Jamie Beamish as Burton
- Tom Hodgkins as Monitor
- Vincent Montuel as Camp G Doctor #1
- Nathan Nolan as Camp G Doctor #2
- Michelle Dockery as False Marissa
- Jessica Barden as Sophie
- Aldo Maland as Miles
- Olivia Williams as Rachel
- Jason Flemyng as Sebastian
- Mohamed Majd as Moroccan Hotel Owner
- Tom Hollander as Isaacs
- Sebastian Hülk as Titch
- Joel Basman as Razor
- Mathias Harrebye-Brandt as Danish Policeman
- Álvaro Cervantes as Feliciano
- Marc Soto as Feliciano's Brother
- Gudrun Ritter as Katrin Zadek
- Martin Wuttke as Knepfler
- Rose Wakesho as Linda
Production
Development
The film's story and script were written by Seth Lochhead while a student at Vancouver Film School. He wrote the original story and script on spec, and finalized the script in 2006, with David Farr providing later changes.Danny Boyle and Alfonso Cuarón were previously attached to direct the film, before it was confirmed that Joe Wright would direct, after Ronan prompted the producers to consider him.
Filming
Most of the filming was done at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin, but locations also included Lake Kitkajärvi in Kuusamo, Finland, several German locations, as well as Ouarzazate and Essaouira in Morocco. Temperatures during the Finland shoot sometimes fell as low as, but Ronan said "Finland did bring out the fairy tale aspects of the story. We were shooting on a frozen lake, surrounded by pine trees covered in snow".Themes and motifs
Reviewers remarked that the setting and style of Hanna significantly depart from a typical action movie. According to the official website, the film has "elements of dark fairy tales" woven into an "adventure thriller". Joe Wright, the director, has said that the movie's theme is a "fantasy" about "overcoming the dark side" during the "rites of passage" of adolescent maturation when a child transforms and "has to go into the world". He said that he was influenced by personal exposure every day as he grew up to "violent, dark, cautionary fairy tales" that "prepare children for the future obstacles in the wider world", as well as his "deep love for the mystical qualities of David Lynch movies", by the patterns of narrative that he prefers because of his dyslexia, and by working as a child in his parents' puppetry company.In an interview with Film School Rejects, Wright acknowledged David Lynch as a major influence on Hanna and also pointed to The Chemical Brothers' score: "You can expect an extraordinarily loud, thumping, deeply funky score that will not disappoint". The music, including The Devil Is In The Beats and The Devil Is In The Details, underscores the movie's style, recalling Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange with musical motifs consistent with Wright's "fairy tale theme" of childhood innocence confronting the modern "synthetic" world. Several reviewers have commented that the movie has a hyper-stylized Kubrickian tone, reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. The "Kubrick-esque" style includes Isaacs' "gleeful sadism... at times darkly comedic," a whistling villain reminiscent of Alex DeLarge. Joe Wright's "love of fairy tales and David Lynch movies" was seen as blending A Clockwork Orange and the work of the Brothers Grimm.
Richard Roeper judged it to be a "surreal fairy tale" with "omnipresent symbolism". Matt Goldberg said it was "an effective and surreal dark fairy tale"......"with a dreamlike sensibility......Everything in the picture is slightly askew and provides immediacy to Hanna’s offbeat coming-of-age tale......a film that refuses to exist solely in the realm of reality or fairy tale......'gritty' realism simply isn’t worthy of the story he’s trying to tell." Fairy tale motifs are strewn through the film. In the "tightly-edited patchwork of visual iconography, allusion and symbolism" Wiegler is equated with the Big Bad Wolf or the queen in Snow White. "Classic fairy tale movie tropes abound;" for example, the camera spins in obvious circles as Hanna makes her escape from the underground government facility early in the film, "just as the young heroine’s world is spinning out of control." Peter Bradshaw found the fairy tale mythology "unsubtle". Conversely, some reviewers did not comment on the fairy tale elements, and others did so with expressive reservation.
Kyle Munkittrick of Discover magazine notes that Hanna is a "transhumanist hero". Despite being genetically engineered to have "high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity", she is still a good-natured person. He says Hanna, "symbolizes the contest between genetics and environment", or, "perhaps more familiarly, nature versus nurture".
Reception
Critical response
Hanna received a 71% rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 224 reviews, and an average rating of 6.88/10. The site's critical consensus states: "Fantastic acting and crisply choreographed action sequences propel this unique, cool take on the revenge thriller." On Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 65/100 based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Justin Chang of Variety said that Hanna is "an exuberantly crafted chase thriller that pulses with energy from its adrenaline-pumping first minutes to its muted bang of a finish". Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, commenting "Wright combines his two genres into a stylish exercise that perversely includes some sentiment and insight".Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, on the other hand, gave the film two stars out of five, stating "With its wicked-witch performance from Cate Blanchett, its derivative premise, its bland Europudding location work and some frankly outrageous boredom, this will test everyone's patience." Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, stated that the film "starts off like a house afire but soon burns itself out", adding that even though the film is "lessed with considerable virtues, including a clever concept, crackling filmmaking and a charismatic star, it ultimately squanders all of them, undone by an unfortunate lack of subtlety and restraint".